Unity doesn't have Dev Grant similar?

any ongoing or future plans?

 

Nope!

 

Yes I was severely lured to submitting my project's application to Unreal Mega Grant and then realize that how it will be painful to make similar status of my game is now on at Unity. Even if succeed to get Mega Grant, hire few Unreal devs, money will vaporized fastly before finishing the final product...

 

You should focus on making something you can use to convince people you're worth funding rather than trying to get a sum of money first like you always do.

 

Well isn't that a catch 22 as you will still have to present a great game idea/prototype/pitch and show the funders that you have the skills to actually deliver the product.

Or you want funding to make a game when you have not managed to make a great game due to low funds?

And if you could make great games with minimum funding then you probably won't need the funding as you will be making money from your great games, right?

PS: Pitching and Business Planning are different skill sets from Game Design/Development.

 

OP:

I think if your game was worth investing in, investors would have swarmed over you by now. In the event they don't know about it and you need cash why not go for devolver digital or matching boutique publisher if you need money for it.

Just make a cool prototype. Is is mad fun to play? there is your gold.

Every time some person tells me "I need moneyyyy to prove it...." er no, you don't. You need solid prototype, you need to love what you do. That's all.

 

There's nothing wrong with getting a grant if one is available, but I don't think it's worth going out of one's way to get it. It's a crutch, and it's the sort of thing that can easily do more harm than good in the long run. At a minimum, it's bad if a grant is the only form of investment that one can attract to a game.

As much as I think kickstarter and early access are abused, at least they involve investment that is directly related to someone's ability to pitch the game right at the target audience. Whereas grants are not always based on a clear conception of merit, at least from the point of view of players.

I also don't really believe in the idea of throwing money at a saturated market. Making tools better improves things for everyone, but random money does not.

 

I am considerably more interested in what people managed to achieve without money. This.... this is the real data, don't you think?

 

The thing is any market can be saturated with products then along comes a genre re-defining product/technology and everything changes e.g. Tetris, Wolfenstein 3D, Minecraft, PUBG/Fortnite to name a few.

So maybe a saturated market is ideal for new ground breaking games?

Also I think challenges are a great way to shake things up with new teams and ideas competing for prizes.

 

When I setup and design new weapon ideas I shoot them at a wall for 5 minutes. If I'm not having fun after 5 minutes, it's not a fun weapon.

If I had spent money on art and assets for that weapon, I'd be wasting it. Fun prototypes are the fundamental core of the game and you can pitch them to publishers who will see easily if something is good or not. A Vertical Slice is different, and is directed at investors/public media.

Nothing wrong with getting free money, but you don't need it in order to build a good prototype that is fun.

 

What are you talking about? What? No. Most of your examples aren't even from a point when there was market saturation.

 

Have you looked at magic leap grants.
https://www.magicleap.com/grant-program

 

No one will give any grant, without solid prove of concept.

 

Magic Leap would have been far better off in my opinion just giving away headsets to any developer with an approved concept rather than handing a large lump sum and devices to a handful of people. I have to imagine there are enough people excited about AR that the large sum wouldn't be necessary for them to make a product.

 

That's why a challenge or competition could be better than a grant/funding driven system.

 

Could be but what benefit is there for Unity? Unity's the default option for people entering industry. Perhaps Unity could spend that super prize money on you know hiring more docs staff and really helping us produce content so much better, for all of us.

I want Unity investing in docs so we can all move towards dots and high performance but not leave people behind who might feel that it's a mental barrier to entry or maybe they feel sidelined?

Unity should spend those millions not on making one little indie fat, but making sure that we all, together learn how to make games in a professional way.

With dots visual scripting on the way, I want to bring people who feel sidelined or left out WITH ME toward AAA performance. So I want Unity to invest heavily in training even beginners in how to use dots, and how to properly make games in Unity. You can probably tell I've always wanted people to come with me toward the higher perf, the clearer workflow, the better practises, I listen to Unity staff carefully, try to forward good practises but really Unity needs to be investing in this more.

I don't need to tell you how much that benefits not only Unity, but everyone with and around us in this industry. Don't treat new people like they're dumb products chewing cud. Teach them properly. Costs money. About what Epic is fattening devs with right now.

Don't care about dev budgets. Unity should be doing the harder job of removing dumb content involving co-routines and replacing it with AAA quality practises that can be applied to the everyday developer including people just starting to code.

I like how Unity started the whole democratization thing off. There's been a pause but now to go further you don't make the individual dev fat, you make everyone have a strong education to do that themselves.

Teach a person to fish, but with the right dotted net.

 

Do you really think throwing money at devs will create 'ground breaking games'? Prototyping a new idea like battle royale is not an incredibly expensive thing to do.

The problem with grants is that they hide the fact that a good game can and will stand on its own two legs, as long as everyone is doing their job. Grants might be good for things like space companies, certainly not games which represent the most easily accessible market in existence.

Sure, but competing for prizes is not the same as getting a grant.

 

Normally VC (Venture Capitalists) does not even meet game idea pitches or even prototype showcases. They just don't have interest because they can't judge this will return their invested money at actual market or not.

So I heard that now they just want already released and proven game. Then why that proven hit game need more investment? Well they maybe don't. But some of them can want more. In this case, there is cross of demands of both parts. VC and game dev.

Or dev team should be sure with strong past success records or backgrounds.

All indie devs not achieved in that status, from point of VC's view, no thanks at all.

So grant is huge for indie devs...

 

Grants are NOT huge for indie devs. There's like 1 grant for every 5000 devs. They are tiny for indie devs. Stop whining and make games.

 

Plus the grants themselves are not significant. Just as an example the link below mentions that $500,000 were handed out to developers making UE4 projects, but that was spread across more than a dozen projects (the actual list on the page totals 17 projects, but there are more yet that were unannounced).

If we divide $500,000 evenly across 17 projects that's just under $30,000 per project. By contrast a developer might cost as much as $100,000 (since you're paying for office space, equipment, etc in addition to the salary). A grant of only that much won't make a successful project out of a failure. You'll just fail a little slower than you were.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-awards-500-000-in-unreal-dev-grants

 

To be fair, how far a dollar goes depends on the kind of development setup you have, but yeah, $30,000 isn't a lot, especially if that's going into the art production pipeline.

inb4 anders shows up and says "we don't even have an artist"

 

I would say,as an example, steam early access is like a grand. Yet how many games are really good there? And out of whole bunch, only few exit early access, as full release in much playable state. With some good exceptions, system in general is much abused.

Hence, grants gurantee nothing and opens potential route for more abuse.

And also we got 'grands' options, like kickstarter for example. But requires even more effort from dev/studio, or will get nothing.

So there are plenty options already.

 

So it was Dev grant, $30,000 per 1 project is nothing.
And now they are Mega grant, says 20x more. Then it means total 100,000,000$?

 

Yes, but just like the original grant's $5 million was not handed out to one developer, the new $100 million grant will not be handed to a single developer. A developer may receive as high as $500,000 or as low as $5,000. It's practically a guarantee too that an indie developer won't be on the high end of that.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...sting-in-devs-enterprise-education-and-beyond

 

Please actually read about the things you're talking about.

Those larger grants? They'll probably go to the things I've highlighted below:

 

I think its nice they are giving back to their community. I don't think Unreal is sacrificing any funding towards engine development/education to provide the grants either.

 

For myself I never really saw the benefit in crowd funding, to finish off my dream project (Fallen Spirit) I'd need at least $10Mil additional funding and unless you're Star Citizen that'll never happen.

Other smaller games like a mid sized top down RPG I could do by myself in 3 - 4 years and in that instance there's no real need. Plus I'd want to avoid accountabilities, giving people false hope / promises etc. it's far cleaner to just release a game the way you want it released.

I'd gather if you want an Unreal grant you have to use UE4, so if your game was worth investing in they'd get their money back but you'd still be stuck with royalties.

 

The way grants often work is just to build buzz for the company giving out the grants. In this case, Unity is definitely the clear market leader that everybody knows about. Epic needs to do things to generate buzz to get UE4 on everybody's radar. Unity does not need to do that, because every developer already knows about Unity.

The individual grants themselves are often not entirely useful for developers. First, grants will go to the absolute best projects, and those projects probably already have enough funding and buzz to get to market. When those best projects win a grant, it amplifies their success, but those games were likely to succeed anyway without a grant.

Next, the amount of individual grants is often fairly small relative to the amount of funding needed to deliver a project of that scope to market.

The bottom line is that if you have a game coming to market that is amazing enough to have a chance at winning a grant, then you probably don't need the grant and the grant likely won't help a lot. If you have an amazing game in production, consider using Kickstarter. Kickstarter will often be easier to get going and will deliver more funding than a grant.

 

Why do you need ten million dollars?

 

Well the word "need" is a little strong I suppose because I have the option not to make the game in the first place. The original concept had 30,000 lines of dialogue / <insert however many NPC's here> stretched over a 40KM2 world, plus a lot of intricacies.

It was along the lines of Mass Effect meets Skyrim. I did have a fully functioning two hour playable demo in Unity 4.6, although Unity constantly flopped over like a fish. I was going to port the demo to Unreal to gain some interest, it's just at that point I'd lost interest and moved on to help a team create an MMO.

Still it doesn't mean I won't try to downsize and have another go at it .

 

Yeah, uh, you need far more than $10,000,000 if that's your current scope, because you also need to account for entire studio costs.

 

Well the games been heavily reduced in scope (like a 1/5th of the size), although to tell the story it has to be of a certain heft and there's no way around it. I'll be starting production again soon (in Unity)..

 

Unreal grants are no strings attached. Plus, they are giving them to people creating films, educational materials, anything cool.

 

Grant money rarely results in successful products in the marketplace. This is because grants are antithetical to market forces.

Game ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution of the game idea is what makes or breaks games. A well executed bad idea is going to be far more successful than a poorly executed good idea. So how is the VC supposed to know how you will execute on your game from just the idea or a basic prototype? You're not showing them what they actually care about.

 

Keep in mind that the game engine itself is funded through royalties (and custom licenses). If the game they give a grant to is successful (and let's be honest they're not going to pick candidates that have no chance at success) it will more than pay back the amount. I'd be very surprised if they weren't at least breaking even. All it takes is one massively successful game.

 

Then if Epic want to re-collect more than Mega Grant money, then all granted game's total earning should be 2000 mil $. Because 2000 * 5%(Royalty of unreal) = 100 (same with Mega Grant total).

Will it be easy that all those game's total sale become 2000 mil (= 2 bil)?
I am just curious.

 

But only string will be attached that You should use Unreal Engine.

 

Based on the range of funding provided by the grant there will be anywhere from 200 projects (assuming maximum funding of $500,000) to 20,000 projects (assuming minimum funding of $5,000). If we aim on the low side of that and say that there will only be 1,000 projects, that's only $2,000,000 per project.

Getting $2,000,000 only requires you to sell 45,000 copies (assuming their store cut of 12%) at $50 per copy. Obduction, a niche game by Cyan, is estimated to have between 100,000 and 200,000 copies. At $30 per copy that's between $3,000,000 and $6,000,000 dollars before store cuts.

https://steamspy.com/app/306760

 

That is the crazy thing, there are literally no strings. You can use any engine you want, you can release on any store you want.

They are really just giving money away.

 

Your submission can be made with any engine you want, but the idea is if you are accepted the final project will involve UE4 in some way. The important part of the quote below is the "and you want to move it to UE4" phrase. The only way around this limitation is to develop a project that "enhances open-source 3D content creation".

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq?active=devgrants

Spoiler: Relevant FAQ Entry

 

Game dev startups often fit the following description:
- A small number of people with some technical skill.
- Working on sweat equity (ie: not being paid for their time, but getting a share of whatever income is generated).
- Little or no liquid capital.

Typically, if you're going to win some grant money for a project you need to demonstrate that you're going to complete the project either way, and that it has some chance of financial success either way. If you can't at least show those things then, financially speaking, your project is a non-starter.

Assuming you tick those boxes but don't have any money, $25k could potentially make a significant difference to a project. Speaking from experience, if you're comparatively time rich and money poor then chasing a grant to fill a gap can be really helpful.

The other thing I'd say is not to just look for "game" grants, or even media grants. If you're making a game with commercial intent then you're operating a business, and many local governments looking to boost their economy have various forms of business support which could be worth looking into.

 

So basically Unreal grant is hookup for make people use Unreal. Which is fine for them. But for me, us? It really depends.
For me, I can't find the reason learning new engine again from zero.
If small team dev or solo can succeed with game, then it does not related with what engine he used.

 

And I think, here may be a little trickster playing, on side of UE4. Lets assume you/I got good progress on a game. Probably spent on a good year or two already, +time to learn engine, like Unity or other, but not UE4 as of yet.

Now
you got fairly successful, and eventually accepted for a grant. If that would be $100k for example, that is not breaking a bank at all. You will spend good year transiting game to new engine. And may need pay somebody, or employee (s) to help. And soon realizing all money are burnt, just to translate game to UE4. In the end, need to spend time to learn it too.

Probably would be halve way through, if somebody already knows well UE4, to make this process seaming less.

Just a random thoughts.

 

So you want access to limited grant money, but you want to do absolutely nothing to get it? Because that's what I'm getting here.

What game are you trying to get a grant for? What state is it in? Is there something about this game that is going to make it stand out compared to everyone else who is also trying to get grant money? Is there something about this game that can only be done in Unity but not UE4?

...Or is this like 50% of the threads you've made in General Discussion? You know, where you're chasing a dollar in the the most backwards way possible? The thing I have seen you do time and time again over my entire history here?

OP, you need to understand that money in games is like water in the desert: you might find a well that taps into lots of water running underground (like Jake Birkett); you might find a single oasis you can bring people to for a long time (Like somebody you may have heard of); more likely than that, you'll probably just drink cactus water and barely survive (see: most career indies).

But it's a desert, and there's something you're going find more than anything else.



And that something is sand and not much else.

Stop asking how to turn sand into water.

 

Yes they do, you just need to know where to look.

If your trying to directly contact VCs then good luck. You want to go through some sort of investment "provider" that bring together VCs using incentives. In UK here there are many like this that use SEIS to get VCs together for "rounds" of funding campaigns, during which tons of indies pitch to them.

One example is Daedelus : http://www.daedalus-partners.com/

But there are many others.

But yeah no VC is going to be interested in your game if you contact them direct. But you certainly can get funding from them using a prototype.

The point about wanting a released game is just plain wrong. Thats not how funding works. Normally you would have a very unfinished prototype, if that is fun you will eventually get funding, but noone wants to see a nearly finished or finished game unless its really good because its easier to give input and rectify the problems before taking to market if it is in early stages.

You shouldnt spend tons of time on a prototype you think is fundable, you should get it to being addictively fun and begin working on your pitch, as that is what is important for that route.

Otherwise ,go the normal route of make a prototype, try and get crowd funding + go on early access and eventually full release, use that money to fund releases on other platforms. Reinvest some of that money in the next project. Rinse and repeat.